Crossed modules of monoids. I: Relative categories (Q2011380)

This is the first of a series of three papers revolving around crossed modules of monoids. This first paper, in particular, focuses on internal categories of monoids, a topic which is studied in terms of pullbacks relative to spans. With the latter class of spans in mind, the paper also studies crossed modules of monoids and simplicial monoids of Moore length \(1\). The importance of these objects, and in particular of crossed modules, lies on the several applications they have in fields like combinatorial homotopy, differential geometry or topological and homotopical quantum field theories. The structure of the paper goes as follow: section \(1\) is devoted to monoids in monoidal categories, where the author lays the foundations about monoids that will play a role in the forthcoming sections. Section \(2\) is devoted to categories in which general pullbacks may not exist, and in order to deal with them, the author assumes the existence of relative pullbacks with respect to some distinguished class of spans. Sections \(3\) and \(4\) represent the most important part of the paper, an dare devoted to relative pullbacks and relative categories. The paper is quite technical, nevertheless it is not hard to read and follow thanks to the milliard of diagrams included by the author. Furthermore, the last section, devoted to the usual summary, points out to interesting examples including braided monoidal categories and other objects that play a role in topological field theories, for instance. So I recommend to make sure that one understands this piece of research because the best is yet to come.